Many businesses today, large and small, collect information from potential customers in an effort to provide goods and services to meet customer needs. In the age of the Internet and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, large amounts of information can be collected automatically, without the physical involvement of a sales representative or any affirmative act by the consumer, at any time of day and any day of the week. Information captured from a potential consumer or client is commonly referred to as a lead.
Leads may be generated in a number of ways. For example, a consumer may fill out a form on a webpage requesting information on an offering, such as a certain product or service. Similarly, a consumer may call a hotline associated with an offering, and information on the consumer's needs may be collected by a sales representative or through IVR. Leads may even be generated without any affirmative request by the consumer. For example, a consumer may go to a particular webpage on the Internet and spend time researching a certain product. The webpage may access information about the consumer from the consumer's computer, such as the consumer's profile and settings, and a lead may be generated based on the information collected.
Once a lead is generated, it must be routed to a responder for development within an acceptable time frame. For example, a lead concerning a home purchase inquiry may be automatically routed to a real estate agent working for a particular broker. Routing may be accomplished automatically based on the time elapsed since the agent last received a lead. In other words, leads may be routed such that the agent who has not received a lead for the longest amount of time is the first in line to receive the next lead generated in an effort to fairly distribute leads and potential commission revenues.
However, such a fixed rule to govern the routing of leads does not consider the fact that certain real estate agents, for example, may be specialized in dealing with certain types of real estate, such as condominium sales, or sales in certain geographic regions. There may be a variety of factors to be considered in order to efficiently and practically route the lead to the responder who is most likely to develop the lead. Such factors may include the source of the lead, the price involved, the type of inquiry (for example, the purchase of a home versus the sale of a home), the city or region, the consumer making the request, or the specific sales representative requested in the lead itself, to name a few. There may be a need to modify the lead routing rules or add new rules as the market or business environment changes, and the need to modify the lead routing rules may be felt at different levels of the organization. For example, the manager of a real estate brokerage may need to structure the routing of leads to certain sales groups in the brokerage based on the source of the lead and the region involved. However, the team leader of each sales group may require that additional criteria be examined to route the lead to the appropriate agent within the group, such as the price range involved or the type of purchase or sale considered (e.g., historic building, commercial real estate, or new construction). Different team leaders may have different needs and different criteria to facilitate the development of the leads.
Efficient routing to the responder who is best equipped to develop the lead is essential for providing the business with the best chance to satisfy the customer's needs. And, routing a lead to an inappropriate or ill-equipped responder may be costly in terms of lost revenues and low customer satisfaction. For example, the routing of a lead to a sales representative who does not deal with the product requested on a regular basis may mean that the representative is unable to answer all of the consumer's questions in an appropriate amount of time, or may give the consumer the impression that the business organization as a whole lacks knowledge on the product. Similarly, the routing of a lead to a sales representative who has not dealt with that particular consumer before may disadvantage the transaction if there is a sales representative within the organization with whom the consumer has conducted transactions and who the consumer trusts.
In addition to efficient routing to the appropriate responder, leads must be acted upon and developed within an acceptable time frame to provide any possibility that the lead will result in a sale. A lead that is routed to the correct responder may sit idle in that responder's lead queue, and the opportunity to provide a product or service based on that lead may be wasted because no other responder may be able to access that lead. Leads may be ignored or forgotten for a number of reasons. For example, a responder may have a backlog of leads and may simply not have the chance to develop a lead at the end of the queue until a later time, when the consumer's needs may have been otherwise satisfied by a competitor or become moot. Likewise, a responder may be on vacation or have an odd schedule such that leads received on a certain day may not be accessible until several days later. While the lead becomes cold in one responder's queue, another responder may have the time, the ability, and the inclination to develop that lead. However, with no way to access the lead from another responder's queue or have the lead forwarded to the free responder, the free responder cannot act to develop what may have been a valid and fruitful lead. Valid, undeveloped leads may cost businesses an enormous amount of money, both directly and indirectly. An undeveloped lead may result in a direct loss of revenues associated with that particular lead, and it may also result in an indirect loss of future revenues as a result of ignored and unsatisfied customers who decide to take their business elsewhere.
Thus there exists a need for a system and method of delivering leads to a responder in way that allows multiple levels of criteria to govern the delivery, provides different members of the organization with different levels of access to modify the delivery rules, and provides a mechanism for automatically escalating an undeveloped lead to another responder.